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Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by email, text messages, tweets and Facebook updates. Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making and personal interaction. The new social operating system of “networked individualism” liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks.

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The annual State of the News Media report is a comprehensive analysis of the health of journalism in America, which includes detailed analysis of eight different media sectors as well as an overview that identifies key trends and key findings of the essential statistics about news in the last year.

“WE TEND to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” observed Roy Amara, an American futurologist. This is certainly proving true of retailers and their attitude to the …

LAST week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and …

WITH her coordinated zebra-striped scarf, tights and arm warmers (arm warmers?), spiky out-to-there hat and pierced tongue, 34-year-old Danah Boyd provides an electric Gen Y contrast to the staid gray lobby of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass., which she enters in a flurry of animated …

SYRIA is off-limits to journalists, especially those toting television gear. But the daily protests in the Damascus suburb of Hamoryah can be watched live on Ustream—and uploaded by locals using mobile phones. When the Libyan regime banned foreign reporters at the start of last year’s uprising, a businessman …

On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural …

When a Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking site announced its “Lie of the Year” for 2011, it set off a partisan firestorm in the blogosphere triggered by liberal critics of that choice.

According to PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan watchdog organization owned by the Tampa Bay Times, the assertion by many Democrats that “Republicans voted to end Medicare” earned the dubious honor as Lie of the Year. Democrats had claimed the plan that passed the GOP-controlled House would have ended the popular health program for seniors. PolitiFact determined that while the Republican plan would alter Medicare, it would not “end” or “kill” the popular program. Some liberals, notably New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, disagreed, asserting that the GOP plan for private vouchers changed Medicare so much that it would, in fact, end the program.

For the week of December 19-23, the debate over the Lie of the Year was the No. 3 subject on blogs, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In seemingly endless times of “trash talk” that led to an improbable and unpopular political victory, the newly minted president clamors: “Now arrives the hour of action.” Fleeting relief comes to the nation as the transition […]

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